Abstract

In the seventh chapter of his extraordinary book The Objective Eye, John Hyman offers various criticisms of Richard Wollheim’s theory of pictorial depiction.1 My immediate purpose in this short piece is to make the case that these criticisms fail. By no means do I claim that there are not other criticisms to be made against Wollheim’s theory or that Hymans’s book as a whole fails—not in its overarching attempt to rescue the objectivity of art from subjectivist views or, more narrowly, that Hyman’s theory of depiction fails. My claim is merely that Wollheim’s theory emerges relatively unscathed by the criticisms in Hyman’s Chapter 7, even if it is vulnerable on other grounds or incompatible with Hyman’s...